Bruce Springsteen with his wife Patti Scialfa in October. Tickets are selling upwards of $1,200 on the secondary market.
Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Born to run, indeed. Bruce Springsteen’s hit Broadway show, Springsteen on Broadway, which was originally slated to last until 26 November, and then February, has now been extended again to June 2018. The new tranche of tickets goes on sale on Tuesday.

The extension of the rocker’s Broadway run confirms Springsteen has established a new paradigm for performers: tapping a seemingly insatiable demand by audiences for what amounts to a nightly reading from his hit autobiography, set to music, interspersed with songs performed solo and with his wife, Patti Scialfa.

But the new ticket allocation will be distributed to the same original list of fans organisers received before the show began the run on 12 October.

The list – run by Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan process – is closed, and is likely to remain so. Anyone else who wants to see the performance must venture on to the secondary market where, three months into the run, tickets are still commanding anywhere between $1,200 and $5,000 a pair, or turn up at the theatre and line up hoping for returns. There is also a lottery for another lucky few.

Last week, fans who already had tickets queued in the bitter cold outside the Walter Kerr theatre on 48th St in midtown Manhattan to see their idol.

Her companion, Trish Hollandsworth, confessed she’d fallen in love with Bruce in 1980. “He’s the best storyteller ever. He relates. He’s our everyman. He’s in our blood, and we feel he writes every song for us specially,” she said.

Some had come from further. “He became my brother when I was fifteen, and he’s never betrayed me,” said Enrico Orlandi from Italy, who’d flown especially to see the show.

Sprinsteen backstage at Meadowlands in New Jersey in 1992. Photograph: Keith Meyers/Getty Images

This intensity of Springsteen infatuation is not new, but his Broadway run may have served to intensify it further.

Alex Bidorini, 45, from Costa Rica, was coming for a second night. “You feel like you’re in his living room. He’s happy in his habitat. Sometimes he sings off the mic so you hear his real voice. So it’s amazing.”

At the end of a contentious year in the city of Donald Trump, New York magazine put Springsteen and his wife on the cover as first among things to love about the Big Apple. “Because after 26 years of marriage, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa still sing love songs to each other on Broadway – and their run was extended for four more months,” the editors explained.

In one sense, Springsteen’s Broadway run is nothing new. Journalist Richard Williams noted in 1981 that Springsteen had a “strong feeling that even the playing of rock’n’roll entails hard work and obligations”.

“It’s not about thew money,” said Hopkins. “He loves his fans. His fans are his therapy. If he didn’t do this he would not exist. He wants to do it till he dies. He gives everything, and gives it every night.”

Nevertheless, Springsteen has found a way to connect with thousands of committed fans, make a handsome paycheck, and to sleep in his own bed at night.

He’s in our blood, and we feel he writes every song for us specially

Trish Hollandsworth, Springsteen fan

Those familiar with the economics of the touring business say that despite the union costs of playing on Broadway, Springsteen could be taking home 60-65% of the weekly gross.

While the price of secondary market tickets has soared, their face value averages at $500 a piece. The Walter Kerr theatre has 948 seats and Springsteen is doing five nights a week. That’s around $1.6m a week to Springsteen, after costs.

Over its current eight-month run, Springsteen could make around the same – $42m – as he made schlepping round the world with the E Street band playing stadium shows to nearly two and a half million people last year.

New York music business veterans struggle to come up with comparisons, butone might be Billy Joel, who has played a show a month at the 10,000-capacity Madison Square Garden going on four years. Over his career, Joel is approaching 100 shows at the Garden. Springsteen has done more than 50 at the Walter Kerr so far and will complete around 180 by the end of June.

New York promoter Ron Delsener, who booked David Bowie’s debut concert at Carnegie Hall on the Ziggy Stardust tour in 1972, and Bob Dylan when he went electric at Forest Hills stadium in Queens, said Springsteen’s long residency would be hard or impossible for another performer to match.

“Bruce? He’s going through the roof with this thing. It’s unheard of. He’s breaking new ground.”

Delsener has booked other artists on Broadway. “We had Jackson Browne played for a week. Elvis Costello. Way back when, Queen opened for Mott the Hoople. Bette Midler, Liza Minelli, Shirley Bassey and people like that. But but no one has played this long. Bruce could go on for years if he wanted to.”

Springsteen is so confident of his market in New York and in his home state of New Jersey, he has not needed a promoter for 20 years.

But Springsteen on Broadway is not really a rock show with opportunities to change up or deviate from the set list. It’s a theatrical Broadway performance, rooted in stories from Springsteen’s hit autobiography, Born to Run, and interspersed with songs.

“This is a performance, not a concert,” points out former Smashing Pumpkins manager Andy Gershon.

“It’s hard work doing the same thing night after night. At least with the live shows he can mix and veer off course depending on how he’s feeling and reacting to the audience. Broadway is very disciplined. You’re doing the same thing, the same show, the same exact tone, day and day out.”

There are rumours that Springsteen plans to take the show to London when he finishes the New York run in June.

That will leave an opening for someone to follow his lead on Broadway. But who? “Would Bowie [have done] that? Would Prince? Maybe Bowie because he lived here,” says Delsener. “I would say of all of the people, Bowie could have done it.”